My St. Patrick’s Day post last year — Are You Abusing Your Donors? — triggered a barrage of comments and protestations pro and con. I knew some nerves had been struck. And it wasn’t because of leprechauns or green beer.

It was because I raised the question of whether we should reconsider, revise or evolve the direct response fundraising playbook rule that says, “The more you ask the more you raise”.

To those who like their playbooks simple, I guess the question was unsettling. After all, a number of us veterans — myself included — have/had been preaching this at conferences, on blogs, and to our clients for at least a decade.

Never one to let the unsettling settle, I then did a four-part series titled Raise More, Ask Less (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) noting there were far better ways to improve the bottom-line without frustrating  — and losing — donors with a flood of appeals.

Today, a Case Study from our sister company DonorTrends aimed at Agitator readers who really do want to raise more and ask less.

Unfortunately, most of the sector has long been strangled by the process of selecting donors based on three primary variables — recency, frequency, and monetary amount (RFM). (See my post RFM: Too Crude for Fundraising )

The use of these somewhat primitive metrics — has led to casting an oversized, unnecessary and costly net that drags down the bottom-line.

There are indeed better ways. By way of example, this Case Study.

Case Study

For one of the most respected environmental organizations asking whether there’s a way to cut fewer trees, sending far less mail, but raising more money was the $164,774 question.

The group set forth this objective: Reduce mail volume to the active donor file (0-24 months) by 15% … without compromising net revenue.

You can download a free copy of the Case Study and all its details here.

Our colleagues at DonorTrends employed a segmentation tool that accurately ranks active donors in terms of optimal productivity, while identifying donors who can be contacted less frequently without compromising revenue. Something RFM isn’t very good at.

In brief here’s a summary of the results produced by the DonorTrends scoring system tool.

Multi Givers

• More net revenue was generated from the top 20% than the entire rest of audience combined.

• Mailing just the top 66,000 donors would have yielded more net revenue than mailing the entire audience of 330,000.

• Had the tool not been used, half of the donors who usually would be mailed under the organization’s traditional use of RFM would have cost the organization revenue. (You’re not alone if you’re surprised by this degree of variance in multi-gift donors. Too many fundraisers assume that mailing the ‘active’ multi file is always net positive.

Single Givers

• Again, the system yielded similar results.

• Get more of the details in the downloadable Case Study.

Bottom Line

• The environmental organization met its objectives. PLUS discovered a ton of important and actionable intelligence about its file. (See the chart below for an example.)

Want to Check Your RFM Selection to see What You’re Missing?

Beyond the superior results, what this Case Study reveals is just how inaccurate the conventional RFM process is as seen by the fact that many high-responding donors were identified who would otherwise be rejected in an RFM select.

By now I hope those readers still wedded to RFM are intrigued enough to ask the DonorTrends folks about their ‘Mailplan Check’ system. That’s where they’ll run your mail plan and your selection through their process and tell you which donors you’ve missed and which donors you should avoid. Here’s their contact information so you can ask them about it.

Thanks to a combination of technology and mathematical algorithms, asking less and making more is a simple, easy and inexpensive process. Just pennies per donor and 2 business days to get your answers.

What tools, techniques and strategies are you using to raise more by asking less?

Roger